Museum, "on October 4, 1941, the Bulgarians enforced an extraordinary measure that prohibited the Jews of Macedonia from engaging in any type of industry or commerce." Over the course of 1942, they enacted increasingly harsh measures against the Jews under their control in Vardar Macedonia, as well as in occupied northern Greece. Some of the harsh demands by the Bulgarian government were that all "Jewish households hand over 20 percent of the value of all assets." The harsh measures culminated in 1943 with the deportation, upon orders from Germany, of "Macedonian Jews" and Greek Jewry to the Bulgarian border on the river Danube. From there they were transported with German boats and trains to the German death camp Treblinka in occupied Poland. Jews from Skopje, Stip, and Bitola, approximately a total of 7,215, were kept in "crowded, filthy conditions in four warehouses at Monopol" for 11 days before being put on trains to Treblinka. Nazi Germany even requested that Bulgaria finance the deportations. On February 22, 1943 an agreement was signed between Theodor Dannecker, the special Nazi envoy sent to facilitate the deportations, and the Bulgarian Commissar for Jewish Affairs, Alexander Belev to deport 20,000 Jews (12,000 from Vardar Macedonia and Thrace and 8,000 from Bulgaria proper). This is the only agreement that a country ever signed with Nazi Germany for deportation of Jews. Bulgaria had to pay all transportation costs and promise never to claim those Jews as citizens.. Many Jews joined the partisans fighting the Nazis in Yugoslavia. In Vardar Macedonia, Haim Estreya Ovadya, a Jewish woman from Bitola, was among the first women to join the partisan movement in 1941. The day before the deportations, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Macedonia gave the Jewish community advance warning of the deportation. Shelters were organized, as well as connections to the partisan units, but unfortunately, few Jews believed that a program for their destruction was underway and chose to stay together in the ghettos instead. In contrast with the old Bulgarian territories, where widespread protests against the deportations took place, including petitions to the Sofia government, in Vardar Macedonia such organized movements were lacking. In the early morning of Thursday, March 11, 1943, Bulgarian police and army rounded up the entire Jewish population of Skopje, Bitola and Štip. The population was sent to a temporary detention center at "Monopol" the state tobacco warehouse in Skopje. Among